I’ve used relatively standard Agile Retrospective questions to great success over my career:

  • What’s one word that best describes this sprint? (one per person)
  • What were the positive aspects of this sprint that we’d like to persist?
  • What were the deltas we’d like to change?
  • How can we change our behavior, process, or definition of done to address the above?
  • What actions can we take (with volunteered date commitments from one or more individuals) to address the above?
  • And the most important “Big Daddy” that we should ask ourselves constantly… Why? Repeat that one another four times…

While this is a nice base, I’ve been looking for other questions to ask. Here’s several that I liked from Ben Linder’s blog, Sharing My Experience:

  • What still puzzles us?
  • What helps you to be successful as a team?
    • How did you do it?
  • Where and when did it go wrong in this sprint?
  • What do you expect, from who?
  • Which tools or techniques proved to be useful? Which not?
  • What is you biggest impediment?
  • If you could change 1 thing, what would it be?
  • What caused the problems that you had in this sprint?

Here are some nice why examples:

  • Why did you do it like this?
  • Why did this (or didn’t this) work for you?
  • Why do you consider something to be important?
  • Why do you feel this way?
  • Why did you decide to work together on this?

From Debategraph, I liked “What don’t we know yet?”

Are there other questions you like to ask during retrospectives?

Photo from Magnus D on flickr